This handsomely illustrated volume commemorates AbrahamLincoln’s 200th birthday and gives rare insight into the Presidentwho shook the world—and whose words and example endure today innations from Siberia to Mexico to Pakistan. This is the officialbook of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM)in Springfield, Illinois that has welcomed more than one millionvisitors since its 2005 opening. Using the exhibition halls as a launching point, this book offersstories, anecdotes, and never-before-seen images and artifacts fromthe museum’s vault. It positions Lincoln as a man of his century, atime ripe with Industrial Revolution, travel and culture,abolition, and war. Worldwide events figure into the story:Britain’s emergence as a democracy, Russia’s freeing of the serfs,Japan’s opening to foreign trade, Germany’s unity underBismarck. Every page reflects the humor, integrity, and unique style ofleadership that made Abe Lincoln a legend. Quote boxes reveal hissayings

A firsthand look at the Battle of Gettysburg offers Union andConfederate viewpoints of the conflict, recreating the three daysand discussing the decisions of Lee, Longstreet, and Meade.Reprint.

In September 1944, the Allies believed that Hitler’s armywas beaten and expected the bloodshed to end by Christmas. Yet aseries of mistakes and setbacks, including the Battle of the Bulge,drastically altered this timetable and led to eight more months ofbrutal fighting. With Armageddon , the eminent militaryhistorian Max Hastings gives us memorable accounts of the greatbattles and captures their human impact on soldiers and civilians.He tells the story of both the Eastern and Western Fronts, raisingprovocative questions and offering vivid portraits of the greatleaders. This rousing and revelatory chronicle brings to life thecrucial final months of the twentieth century’s greatest globalconflict.

On 2 August 1944, Winston Churchill mocked Adolf Hitler in theHouse of Commons by the rank he had reached in the First World War.'Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of HerrHitler, of Corporal Hitler', Churchill jibed. 'Even military idiotsfind it difficult not to see some faults in his actions'. AndrewRoberts' previous book "Masters and Commanders" studied thecreation of Allied grand strategy; "The Storm of War" now analyzeshow Axis strategy evolved. Examining the Second World War on everyfront, Roberts asks whether, with a different decision-makingprocess and a different strategy, the Axis might even have won.Were those German generals who blamed everything on Hitler afterthe war correct, or were they merely scapegoating their formerFuhrer once he was safely beyond defending himself? The book isfull of illuminating sidelights on the principle actors that bringtheir characters and the ways in which they reached decisions intofresh focus.

Despite five centuries of investigation by historians, thesinister deaths of the boy king Edward V and his younger brotherRichard, Duke of York, remain two of the most fascinating murdermysteries in English history. Did Richard III really kill “thePrinces in the Tower,” as is commonly believed, or was the murderersomeone else entirely? Carefully examining every shred ofcontemporary evidence as well as dozens of modern accounts, AlisonWeir reconstructs the entire chain of events leading to the doublemurder. We are witnesses to the rivalry, ambition, intrigue, andstruggle for power that culminated in the imprisonment of theprinces and the hushed-up murders that secured Richard’s claim tothe throne as Richard III. A masterpiece of historical research anda riveting story of conspiracy and deception, The Princes in theTower at last provides a solution to this age-old puzzle. Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more. RandomHouseReadersCircle.com

A masterpiece o f the historian’s art, Hugh Thomas’s TheSpanish Civil War remains the best, most engrossing narrativeof one of the most emblematic and misunderstood wars of thetwentieth century. Revised and updated with significant newmaterial, including new revelations about atrocities perpetratedagainst civilians by both sides in this epic conflict, this"definitive work on the subject" (Richard Bernstein, The NewYork Times ) has been given a fresh face forty years after itsinitial publication in 1961. In brilliant, moving detail, Thomasanalyzes a devastating conflict in which the hopes, dreams, anddogmas of a century exploded onto the battlefield. Like no otheraccount, The Spanish Civil War dramatically reassembles theevents that led a European nation, in a continent on the brink ofworld war, to divide against itself, bringing into play themachinations of Franco and Hitler, the bloodshed of Guernica, andthe deeply inspiring heroics of those who rallied to the side ofdemocracy. Communists, an

Gibbon’s masterpiece, which narrates the history of the RomanEmpire from the second century a.d. to its collapse in the west inthe fifth century and in the east in the fifteenth century, iswidely considered the greatest work of history ever written. Thisabridgment retains the full scope of the original, but in a compassequivalent to a long novel. Casual readers now have access to thefull sweep of Gibbon’s narrative, while instructors and studentshave a volume that can be read in a single term. This uniqueedition emphasizes elements ignored in all other abridgments—inparticular the role of religion in the empire and the rise ofIslam.

More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is amagnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased,skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking andsophisticated research. CHICAGO TRIBUNE Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman hasbrought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl WarI. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledgeof her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for thefirst time, just how the war started, why, and why it could havebeen stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time anda people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST willnot be forgotten.

National Bestseller New York Times Editors’ Choice Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end allwars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British primeminister David Lloyd George, and French premier GeorgesClemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmarkwork of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic andintimate view of those fateful days, which saw new politicalentities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out ofthe ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern worldredrawn.

In this groundbreaking work, leading historian FelipeFernández-Armesto tells the story of our hemisphere as a whole,showing why it is impossible to understand North, Central, andSouth America in isolation without turning to the intertwiningforces that shape the region. With imagination, thematic breadth,and his trademark wit, Fernández-Armesto covers a range ofcultural, political, and social subjects, taking us from the dawnof human migration to North America to the Colonial andIndependence periods to the “American Century” and beyond.Fernández-Armesto does nothing less than revise the conventionalwisdom about cross-cultural exchange, conflict, and interaction,making and supporting some brilliantly provocative conclusionsabout the Americas’ past and where we are headed.

On June 6, 1944, American and British troops staged thegreatest amphibious landing in history to begin Operation Overlord,the battle to liberate Europe from the scourge of the Third Reich.With gut-wrenching realism and immediacy, Hastings reveals theterrible human cost that this battle exacted. Moving beyond just the storming of Omaha beach and D-Day, heexplores the Allies’ push inward, with many British and Americaninfantry units suffering near 100 percent casualties during thecourse of that awful summer. Far from a gauzy romanticizedremembrance, Hastings details a grueling ten week battle tooverpower the superbly trained, geographically entrenched GermanWehrmacht. Uncompromising and powerful in its depiction of wartime,this is the definitive book on D-Day and the Battle ofNormandy.

From one of the greatest historians of the Spanish world, hereis a fresh and fascinating account of Spain’s early conquests inthe Americas. Hugh Thomas’s magisterial narrative of Spain in theNew World has all the characteristics of great historicalliterature: amazing discoveries, ambition, greed, religiousfanaticism, court intrigue, and a battle for the soul ofhumankind. Hugh Thomas shows Spain at the dawn of the sixteenth century as aworld power on the brink of greatness. Her monarchs, Fernando andIsabel, had retaken Granada from Islam, thereby completingrestoration of the entire Iberian peninsula to Catholic rule. Flushwith success, they agreed to sponsor an obscure Genoese sailor’splan to sail west to the Indies, where, legend purported, gold andspices flowed as if they were rivers. For Spain and for the world,this decision to send Christopher Columbus west was epochal—thedividing line between the medieval and the modern. Spain’s colonial adventures began inauspiciously: Columbus’smeagerly f

Every few months you'll read a newspaper story of thediscovery of some long-lost art treasure hidden away in a Germanbasement or a Russian attic: a Cranach, a Holbein, even, not longago, a da Vinci. Such treasures ended up far from the museums andchurches in which they once hung, taken as war loot by Allied andAxis soldiers alike. Thousands of important pieces have never beenrecovered. Lynn Nicholas offers an astonishingly good account ofthe wholesale ravaging of European art during World War II, of howteams of international experts have worked to recover lostmasterpieces in the war's aftermath and of how governments "arestill negotiating the restitution of objects held by theirrespective nations." --This text refers to an out of print orunavailable edition of this title.

It was the most influential marriage of the nineteenthcentury–and one of history’s most enduring love stories.Traditional biographies tell us that Queen Victoria inherited thethrone as a na?ve teenager, when the British Empire was at theheight of its power, and seemed doomed to find failure as a monarchand misery as a woman until she married her German cousin Albertand accepted him as her lord and master. Now renowned chroniclerGillian Gill turns this familiar story on its head, revealing astrong, feisty queen and a brilliant, fragile prince workingtogether to build a family based on support, trust, and fidelity,qualities neither had seen much of as children. The love affairthat emerges is far more captivating, complex, and relevant thanthat depicted in any previous account. The epic relationship began poorly. The cousins first met asteenagers for a few brief, awkward, chaperoned weeks in 1836. Atseventeen, charming rather than beautiful, Victoria already “showedsigns of wanting her own way

The distinguished historian of the Jewish people, Howard M.Sachar, gives us a comprehensive and enthralling chronicle of theachievements and traumas of the Jews over the last four hundredyears. Tracking their fate from Western Europe’s age of mercantilism inthe seventeenth century to the post-Soviet and post-imperialistIslamic upheavals of the twenty-first century, Sachar applies hisrenowned narrative skill to the central role of the Jews in many ofthe most impressive achievements of modern civilization: whether inthe rise of economic capitalism or of political socialism; in thediscoveries of theoretical physics or applied medicine; in “higher”literary criticism or mass communication and popularentertainment. As his account unfolds and moves from epoch to epoch, fromcontinent to continent, from Europe to the Americas and the MiddleEast, Sachar evaluates communities that, until lately, have beenunderestimated in the perspective of Jewish and world history—amongthem, Jews of Sephardic

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, PulitzerPrize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the greatuntold stories of American history: the decades-long migration ofblack citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities,in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus ofalmost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkersoncompares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples inhistory. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gainedaccess to new data and official records, to write this definitiveand vividly dramatic account of how these American journeysunfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this storythrough the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, whoin 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi forChicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in oldage, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senateseat; sh

"In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, toNormandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversaryof D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe thatmarked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.There, I underwent a life-changing experience. As I walked thebeaches with the American veterans who had returned for thisanniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened totheir stories, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for allthey had done. Ten years later, I returned to Normandy for thefiftieth anniversary of the invasion, and by then I had come tounderstand what this generation of Americans meant to history. Itis, I believe, the greatest generation any society has everproduced." In this superb book, Tom Brokaw goes out into America, to tellthrough the stories of individual men and women the story of ageneration, America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of ageduring the Great Depression and the Second World War and went

"Narrative history in the great tradition . . ." ChicagoTribune Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and bestselling authorBarbara W. Tuchman analyzes the American Revolution in abrilliantly original way, placing the war in the historical contextof the centuries-long conflicts between England and both France andHolland. This compellingly written history paints a magnificentportrait of General George Washington and recounts in rivetingdetail the events responsible for the birth of our nation.

Book De*ion Marco Polo?s account of his journey throughout the East in thethirteenth century was one of the earliest European travelnarratives, and it remains the most important. Themerchant-traveler from Venice, the first to cross the entirecontinent of Asia, provided us with accurate de*ions of lifein China, Tibet, India, and a hundred other lands, and recordedcustoms, natural history, strange sights, historical legends, andmuch more. From the dazzling courts of Kublai Khan to the perilousdeserts of Persia, no book contains a richer magazine of marvelsthan the Travels. This edition, selected and edited by the great scholar ManuelKomroff, also features the classic and stylistically brilliantMarsden translation, revised and corrected, as well as Komroff?sIntroduction to the 1926 edition. Book Dimension length: (cm)19.7 width:(cm)12.8

In The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With theOld Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-centurybattles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitiveoral history, The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge’s acclaimedfirst-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns tothrill, edify, and inspire a new generation. An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of suchheroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledgebecame part of the war’s famous 1st Marine Division–3d Battalion,5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to bethrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmareof flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledgehit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled withfear but no longer with panic. Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the NewTestament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity andsearing honesty the experience of a soldier

FORT SUMTER TO PERRYVILLE "Anyone who wants to relive the Civil War, as thousands ofAmericans apparently do, will go through this volume withpleasure.... Years from now, Foote's monumental narrative mostlikely will continue to be read and remembered as a classic of itskind."--New York Herald Tribune Book Review "Here, for a certainty, is one of the great historical narrativesof our century, a unique and brilliant achievement, one that mustbe firmly placed in the ranks of the masters."--Van Allen Bradley,Chicago Daily News